Soc Rel Committee Plans Concentration Revisions

The Social Relations Department has reached tentative agreement on extensive changes in its requirements for both honors and non-honors concentrators, the CRIMSON learned yesterday.

A revised program has been drawn up by the Department's standing Committee on Undergraduate Instruction in an attempt to make majoring in Social Relations, as one member of the Department put it yesterday, "more like concentration in the traditional Harvard sense, providing all students in the department with a common body of experience and content."

The Committee is headed by Clyde K. M. Kluckhohn, professor of Anthropology. The group's secretary is William M. McCord, Instructor in Social Psychology and Chairman of the Social Relations department's board of tutors.

The details of the program have not yet been completely worked out or finally approved, but by yesterday these changes had become definite:

1) Social Relations 1, at present a half-year course, will be expanded to a full-year course and will be required of all concentrators.

2) An entirely new half-year course in methods and problems of Social Relations research will be required of all concentrators. It is probably intended for the latter half of the junior year. The course will have both lectures and sections.

Contrary to usual practice, however, the sections will be conducted by full-fledged Department members, instead of section men. The problems studied will come from all branches of Social Relations.

3) All concentrators will participate in half-year seminars during their senior year. The seminar groups will be kept small, with about 10 or 12 members.

In preparing for the changes, one department member emphasized yesterday, the committee "extensively and systematically consulted" with undergraduate concentrators.